Vampire Choices
“And if Eeyore’s back snapped suddenly, then we could all laugh. Ha ha! Amusing in a quiet way,” said Eeyore, “but not really helpful.”
“Well,” said Piglet meekly, “I thought—”
“Would it break your back, Eeyore?” asked Pooh, very much surprised.
“That’s what would be so interesting, Pooh. Not being quite sure till afterwards.”
Pooh said “Oh!” and they all began to think again.
- A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
When it comes to decision-making, the idea of the vampire problem was first suggested by Jordan Ellenberg to L. A. Paul, who used the illustration in her book Transformative Experience, and was then expounded on by David Brooks in the New York Times and again in his book The Second Mountain. It goes something like this:
Imagine you had the chance to become a vampire. With one bite, you would obtain immortality, superhuman speed and power, and a life of glamorous intensity. Your friends, who have already decided to become vampires, tell you the experience is amazing. They drink animal blood, not human blood, and say they would never go back. They can’t really tell you, a mere human, what the experience is like—you’d have to be a vampire to know.
Would you do it? Would you make that decision, knowing you can never go back?
The problem is this: you have to use your human self and preferences to guess whether you’d enjoy having a vampire self and preferences. But you can’t know what it would be like being a vampire until you are one—becoming a vampire is so transformational that it is rationally impossible to know whether your future self would make the choice based only on what your current self knows.
“You shouldn’t fool yourself. You have no idea what you are getting into.”
Life is full of vampire choices: getting married, going into a career field, attending a particular school, believing in a faith, making a move. Many of the most centrally important decisions we make in life are those in which we are asked to make a transformational choice without knowing what our transformed self would want.
Perhaps the purest version of this choice is deciding to have a child. Brooks notes, “On average, people who have a child suffer a loss of reported well-being. They’re more exhausted and report lower life satisfaction. And yet few parents can imagine going back and being their old pre-parental selves. Parents are like self-fulfilled vampires. Their rich new lives would have seemed incomprehensible to their old childless selves.”
How do we make transformational decisions? First of all, by definition, sheer logic or the prioritization of self-fulfillment will not suffice. That’s part of the genius of this whole idea: it knocks into pieces the consumeristic calculus we tend to bring into all our decision-making. We’re used to deciding like shoppers: acting autonomously to select whatever will produce the greatest utility or most desirable outcome according to our current frame of view. We shop like this for everything from schools to spouses. But that is not cogent. We cannot simply ask “what do I want? What will fulfill my needs?” when those wants and needs will inevitably change.
Stanley Hauerwas speaks incisively about this when it comes to shopping for spouses:
Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic . . . The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person. We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
So how does one make the choice? L. A. Paul suggests we must choose based on whether we want to discover that person we will become. Brooks suggests choosing based on what we believe to be good for ourselves, what will make us a better person. Or what touches our deepest desires. Others have suggested going on gut feeling or intuition.
All of these things move us in the right direction. Instead of asking “what will get me what I want?” we ask, “What is worth discovering?” “What do I admire?” “Who do I want to become?” “What do I believe in?” We must move beyond our own cognition to some framework outside of ourselves or our present situation, a framework which speaks to what we believe to be our purpose, and the values most important to us.
The Christian worldview offers something even more specific: not only “what do I believe in?” but “who do I believe in?” The Bible is not secretive about transformation, about either its necessity or its purpose. Put simply, we are to become like Christ. That is the guideline by which we make transformational choices. Sometimes it becomes clear that one path serves this purpose more than another, and we must consider that seriously. Other times, we may realize that the circumstantial path we choose is less important than the way that we live it. Either way, the perspective shifts: away from ourselves, away even perhaps from an overreliance on decision-making itself, and onto God. In the end, that’s what vampire choices call for: faith. Believing in a future you cannot see or even fully understand.
